Ohio Republicans Want 19th Century Sex Ed

Republicans in the Ohio state legislature have added an amendment to a budget bill that would set sex education standards back decades. The provision would forbid any teaching that “condones” any “gateway sexual activity.” It even provides serious financial penalties for doing so.

New sex education standards that would ban any teaching that condones “gateway sexual activity” and allows parents to sue if their child receives such instruction are among the Republican amendments added to the two-year budget bill today…

“Today the Ohio House Finance Committee voted to send our state back to the 1950s” said Kellie Copeland, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice, in a statement. “The Ohio House is doing everything they can to restrict access to reproductive health care and medically accurate information that help Ohioans live healthy lives. Governor Kasich can stop these dangerous attacks on women’s health care. We need him to speak out against these budget provisions and to line-item veto these dangerous measures when they reach his desk.” …

The sex education addition says that any instruction must not promote “any gateway sexual activity or health message that encourages students to experiment with sexual activity.”

Yep, that’ll help. If you just don’t talk to them about sex at all other than telling them not to have it, they won’t have sex. Because the goal of education should obviously be to refuse to educate and to maintain their ignorance.

Gateway Sexual Activity? You mean like dating, proms, sock hops (sorry, that was for the older readers). I guess kissing, petting, and wet dreams are out of the question too?

Synfandel

They only want the best for their children: ignorance and denial. Splendor In the Grass.

dugglebogey

Wait. What’s the fine if I get a boner?

Captain Mike

“gateway sexual activity.”

Being human?

hinschelwood

#1 I was wondering about the “gateway sexual activity” as well. Maybe somebody can enlighten me on this term. All it brings to my mind is:

a) something that is performed in a gateway.

b) something involving padlocks and chains.

I could understand senators wanting to prevent children from being taught about such practices, but I feel I must be missing something.

shouldbeworking

How can this be in a budget bill? Shouldn’t everything in the bill concern the budget?

The illogic, it burns!

cptdoom

I cannot believe the cynicism in these comments. Ohio is simply embarking on the same course so many societies have taken in the past – to rigidly control the sexual behavior of its citizens. Why should they worry that no society has ever actually successfully controlled such behavior? They might be the first, right?

senor

Need to save the booklearnin’ for legitimate sexual activity I guess.

glodson

Gateway sexual activity?

When I was a teen, a light breeze was enough for me to experiment with sexual activity in private which greatly fueled my want to try said activities with other people. I get the impression that, while not quite universal, was extremely common.

But what the fuck would we want kids exploring their own sexuality to be actually informed about it, comfortable talking about sex, and know how to safely engage in sex? Let alone prevent unwanted pregnancies. That would just be silly.

http://denkeensechtna.blogspot.com Deen

The sex education addition says that any instruction must not promote “any gateway sexual activity or health message that encourages students to experiment with sexual activity.”

And with “promote” they mean “mention”.

slc1

Re glodson @ #9

Let alone prevent unwanted pregnancies.

To the born agains, pregnancy is punishment for engaging in premarital sex.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1468751142 Kevin

So, I’m old. A geezer. I never received any “education” of any sort on sexual activity. Not from school, not from my parents, not from anybody other than the “Playboy Advisor”, which was pretty weak tea back then. (Side note: I ended up working with a guy who wrote that column for a while. Nice, white-haired Jewish guy from Queens. He ate cashews for lunch. To say that he was not who I pictured is probably the understatement of the year.)

Seems to me that I worked it out fine all by myself. Would have been nice to have had some of the myths exploded. And certainly the “safe sex” thing was different back then — pre-herpes even. We were way more concerned about not getting girls pregnant — but were too embarrassed to buy condoms. There was one guy who had the guts to ask his uncle — he was our “dealer”. In condoms. Yeah. That era. Don’t miss it.

Point is, kids find out about sex regardless of how much we try to hide it from them. Including about “gateway” activities, which believe me, I knew all about — three or four times a day back then. So why handicap today’s kids with bad information or misinformation or no information at all? What the point? What exactly is the goal? How does this approach achieve anything other than make kids hate their elders for being terminally stupid?

Gad, Republicans must not have 4 working synapses among them.

chilidog99

shouldbeworking @6

How can this be in a budget bill? Shouldn’t everything in the bill concern the budget?

Maybe they are trying to expand the budget?

Remember what happened in Texas? they cut out all sex ed except abstinence only and now they are dealing with a huge budget increase of unwed teen pregnancy services.

naturalcynic

How can this be in a budget bill? Shouldn’t everything in the bill concern the budget?

The illogic, it burns!

We are discussing Republicans. It’s called spontaneous ignition.

http://en.uncyclopedia.co/wiki/User:Modusoperandi Modusoperandi

Come on, Ed Brayton! Liberty is keepin’ Big Government out of your kid’s heads. Besides, you can’t learn about baby makin’ from no book; everybody knows the best way to learn is to only listen to hearsay until marriage. Then the learnin’ arrives all at once, from what I’ve been told. The rings must be magical or something (“WonderMarriage powers, activate!”).

chilidog99“Remember what happened in Texas? they cut out all sex ed except abstinence only and now they are dealing with a huge budget increase of unwed teen pregnancy services.”

Lies! They cut out all sex ed except ab-only and they gutted the family planning budget, and now they are dealing with increased unwed teen pregnancies.

Trebuchet

They’re trying to return to the time I well remember from high school in the ’60’s, when female students simply disappeared and were never spoken of, while their boyfriends just went about their business. Cause it’s all about the sluts, don’t you know.

Pieter B, FCD

gateway sexual activity

Like reaching puberty?

I remember the days when the drugstore at Grand Central Station (NYC) had a special counter you went to to buy condoms. Every Friday afternoon there’d be a line of guys neither looking at nor talking to one another, who’d lean in and whisper to the pharmacist. He’d get a small paper bag, go to a drawer and slip a package into the bag, fold it closed, whisper the price to the customer, collect the money, and repeat the process for the next guy. I never once saw anyone look into the bag to verify his purchase or god forbid take the package out to look at it. Coulda been magic beans in there for all anyone knew. The funniest part was that the counter was in the middle of the store, open all around, not in a back corner.

Since this was pre-Griswold, I wonder what percentage of the purchases were smuggled into neighboring Connecticut?

http://spaninquis.wordpress.com/ Spanish Inquisitor

Trebuchet

I know where those female students disappeared to. My grandmother was the “house mother” at a home for unwed mothers run by Catholic Charities back in the late 50s and 60s. As a child, I always wondered why she ran a home for fat girls.

lordshipmayhem

Any teaching that “condones” any “gateway sexual activity” will incur serious financial penalties. But will those penalties be equal to (let alone exceed) the serious financial penalties of unwanted, premature pregnancy, that such teaching would have prevented?

Synfandel

How can this be in a budget bill? Shouldn’t everything in the bill concern the budget?

You’d think, wouldn’t you? Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada has found—and used multiple times—a little trick to cut down on all that annoying democratic discussion that used to happen in Parliament. He puts his entire year’s legislative agenda into one gargantuan omnibus budget implementation bill and uses his majority in both chambers and the power of closure to pass it at break-neck speed. The only committee that gets to study any of it is the finance committee, which is utterly incompetent to review legislation in non-budget areas such as transportation, education, natural resources, trade, environment, health, national defence, public safety, banking regulation, intellectual property, immigration, and so on and so on.

Conservative agenda: one. Democracy: zero.

tubi

I went to a pretty progressive private boarding school, so we were able to make up our own sex ed syllabus. I learned what goes where and how to keep other stuff from going where you don’t want it to, yet. But I sure as shit don’t remember any demonstrations with sexual stimulation devices. Not in class, anyway.

Remember – saying “hello” to a member of the opposite sex is ‘gateway oral sex’!

steve oberski

@nigelTheBold

Quite the little shop of horrors.

samgardner

You guys are looking at this the wrong way…

“Now kids, I don’t condone this in any way, but some people enjoy handcuffs/cosplay/nude historical reenactments/etc. What? You’re asking if there are any consequences? I’m sure your sense of guilt would be a consequence (wink, wink). Now other people do things like asphyxophilia, that have other consequences such as death. I don’t condone any of it, of course, and I know how all you kids are all about obeying adults, especially when they tell you reason not to do something is because its immoral.” (Wink)

slc1

When I drove across the country from California to New York to attend graduate school, one of the first things I noticed, at least in the Midwest, was that there were vending machines in men’s rest rooms in gas stations that dispensed condoms. Never saw that in California.

ArtK

@ Kevin

What the point? What exactly is the goal?

The point is that if we (meaning the conservatives who think they represent all of society) close our eyes and wish really, really hard, all that icky sex will go away.

@ slc1

… there were vending machines in men’s rest rooms in gas stations that dispensed condoms. Never saw that in California

You just didn’t visit the right restrooms in California. I’ve seen them up and down the state.